Public Comment

...Although academia remains for me what death was for the Ophelia of Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row”: “quite romantic,” in hindsight, it occurs to me that treating academia as a field of holy and religious “Ivory Towers” first of all, in its dogma and myopia contradicts the truly “academic” spirit......When I failed to both receive funding from an MFA program and employment from a nearby university after graduating with my bachelor’s degree… I panicked, raced away from my dream, and grew convinced that academia would inevitably fizzle out from the global economy in the midst of such a rich world of cheaper information exchange across the internet’s digital media platforms......one beautiful, early September day, about two weeks ago now I think it was, I was walking in the development where my wife and I live, enjoying the refreshingly cool and breezy air. I thought about how much energy Ashley and I put into figuring out where we wanted to live (about 8 years!) We had a long list of potential places in and out of state and we researched the job and real estate markets in virtually every area of interest to us: places in Texas, California, Florida, New Hampshire, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, South Jersey, North Jersey, the Jersey Shore, et cetera...

I call the university my temple, holy place, sanctuary, haven, oasis, paradise, Shangri-La, et cetera…...It seeks (seeks!) an honesty whose nude body radiates bluntly with fitness, and beauty, exploring its sexuality, or dressing in clothes with a style of elegance that offends only offenders......Knowledge and critical thinking, in theory, preserved and advanced…

*For Robert Musil who inspired me to get a little creative with subtitles *A) Time Resides in the Upper-Class of my Hierarchy of Values Time. I value it more than money. Which doesn’t say so much for money actually. Yes, money stands high as one the most powerful and unique resources and forms of energy and power a human can possess…not just because by flashing it around you can buy, attract products and people to you and thus appear powerful, because with it you can compel services, start and win a war, et cetera, but more abstractly what money represents is the act of enabling…beyond its quality as “capital” it is raw, pure resource which directed in this or that way leads to milestones in medicine, technology, the spreading and preservation of art and culture. Used to its full potential it’s like a genie in a magic lamp though you may be limited to more or less than three wishes. Similar to  Aladdin’s genie it cannot make someone fall in love with you. It can’t in itself kill someone or bring someone back to life, though it can try to buy the corrupted or merciful and gracious efforts to bring someone back to life. My point is that it is that time outdoes money and thus its meaning towers over money’s......B) Time and both experiential and corporeal mortality I hate to bring mortality into this discussion. It is my least favorite subject... ...C) Borrowing Heidegger’s title ‘Being and Time’  Sometimes I think of reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time simply because the title is so captivating (how wide and all encompassing it seems— mortality of the living and conscious, eternity of the universe?). It had been my recollection that nothing more than the book’s title ever grabbed my attention…thus far in my 33 year life, but as I flipped through Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy to read up on Heraclitus and change I rediscovered an annotation I made who knows when that I thought Heraclitus was “Like Hiedegger” (yes, I capitalized my L and misspelt the man’s name). I do not remember in the least why I wrote this.  ...D) Why I think the ‘week’ is my favorite unit of time lately and how I loved my Saturdays Over the past few years I sought out time management advice from professors and mentors. The only novel word of advice I received was to keep lists which I now do. Actually one professor complimented my basic approach, saying I appeared to have it covered and that when I finally graduated my to-do lists would simmer down. I appreciated it but it is now a year or so later and the subject still makes me feel as though I am slightly neurotic....

The summer of 2019 is almost over now and the air, to my immense pleasure, throughout this last week has significantly cooled down…almost unseasonably so......Overlooking the sadness or nostalgia we sometimes feel in response to our awareness that life simply happens then ends, and that thus, experiences do not and cannot “happen again” (except within memory, the perception of its audio or visual record)… I enjoy the seasons changing. One aesthetic benefit of living in a “temperate” area as opposed to, say, a tropical one, or a desert, is that you get not just the changes of temperature and weather, but also, the visual changes—leaves turning yellow, brown, orange, red and then falling to the ground, eventually snow and ice, and then a burst of green and other flowery colors! Mental stimulation!This outlook is relatively new for me......in a very panicked fury, I said to my mother: “fuck you!”Before I proceed I must make emphatically clear my shame and regret about this. Of course, who among us have not said at one point or another to our parents some version of “I hate you!” or “fuck you!”---? Not that this coming of age and rites of passage thing justifies such a traditional adolescent vitriol and angst but I don’t imagine my own gracelessness here that I unfairly subjected my mother to was exceptionally unique or even personal. I imagine even the most polite teenager demonstrates a capacity for critical thought if he or she at some point contradicts his or her parents to his or her parents’ profound dismay. I understand though this always deeply upset my mother.......My mother should write a book espousing her views on motherhood. It would make the world a better place......(On the matter of my connection to my feelings I should like to bring up that individuals occasionally offer in the bodies of their critiques that I may come across as detached from feelings. A few people mentioned to me that I come across to them as “pretentious,”  “condescending” or as though I were hiding, even if only inadvertently, my more “human” layers......Contrasting that awful burnout feeling and context with the peace and quiet, especially in Durham, New Hampshire and that surrounding area, which was significantly less built up and less populated than central New Jersey, and how that refreshing vibe was so accentuated by the snow…and not a fierce, blizzardy snow, but a calm, soft kissing kind of snow…

I’m beginning to understand some of my anxiety’s nuances beyond the constantly striking panic attacks, insomnia, night time alcohol abuse, and obsessive-compulsive thoughts of death that used to consume me. The more blatantly obvious symptoms now curbed, courtesy of Effexor, and a wife who devotes herself to conceptualizing and practicing a philosophy of what I believe it means to thrive (like seeing a doctor for a check up, “for starters”), certain other symptoms, previously overshadowed, now capture my attention—for example: impatience and hastiness...

Mark Holland, he owned the hostel where I could no longer afford to lodge; with grace, he insisted I stay.Mark treated my poems like hundred dollar bills; If I read them to him, and listened to his lectures on music, I could stay, and food was on him...

Walking helps me meditate.My thoughts: streaming, roaming, like wind, or birds flying.No obligations… except to walk, and meditate.The sky, a sheet of blank white paper.I wish it would snow.Yes, let winter arrive early!...

January, 2016: I see President Barack Obama crying.Small splotches of white salt under his dark brown, snowy night eye seem dabbed on there by a paint brush; of course, it’s just the light reflecting off his evaporating tears.The photo was taken by Jim Watson for AFP/Getty Images when President Obama was giving a speech on gun control.November, 2008: I was 22. It was my second time voting for president.I voted for Barack Obama.Just the past month my father had died because his colon exploded...

The fight for justice…hands stretching, muscles tearing, reaching for the sky- daunting, tempting to surrender, and submit, assuming futility, but people walked on the moon, made a vaccine for malaria, polio, and other diseases.I contemplate my White Privilege, resenting every remnant of it, and scowl at America’s White Supremacist bigot bullies…oppressing…Native Americans, African Americans, Arabs, Jews, Women, the non-heterosexual, the poor, the vulnerable, the non-Christian, non-Caucasian and it disturbs me, makes me drink my whiskey with a little extra intensity…I fear that nothing, not a single atrocity, would have moved Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters in the Senate to oppose his confirmation...

Fear of dying in my sleep…of dying in poverty, no career I climbed up to reflect on… just a plethora of aspirations and thoughts racing like a flock of thousands of birds headed south…while America’s democracy and rule of law corrode…gin and prayers fail to relax me…But I am like my grandmother.She used to listen to talk radio late at night as she fell asleep, sometimes not until three a.m.…I watch the news on my laptop…

This election feels like a spaceship heading for a black hole.Please don’t explode…please don’t explode…please don’t explode, and shatter like the German democracy did in 1933…Last Sunday night at 9 p.m.– the Sunday before the election–instead of “Headliners,” which is usually on at that time on MSNBC, there was special coverage discussing the “big day”– the anticipation, a spectacle like fireworks on New Years’ Eve…

Music plays on my Apple laptop…the back reads: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.”According to the “executive summary” for the China Labor Watch Website “workers making the iPhone” are exploited, paid just $1.85 per hour.(Compare to my $11; compare to $7.25, America’s minimum wage).The Guardian reports that the Foxcon Longhua factory in China, which manufactures iPhones,has body catching nets to curtail its suicide epidemic.Should I trash what the workers produced in protest, and boycott?...

Things we do not desire, which I do not prefer to list, do exist in this universe but not in here, where our hands are touching like water touches the surface of the Earth as we float a little, on a black, leather couch... 

*What am I forgetting to think about, distracted and preoccupied with that damn blockade of financial concerns and anxiety? How many of us ask ourselves this question or… how many others could we ask this question for as they too are bogged down by things which compassionate folks would like to see them not bogged down by...*...And beyond the economic anxiety and poverty there are other things which hijack the mind’s potential or rob a life...  the emotions of serious illness, being damned by some kind of “bad luck”-- medical malpractice, just a bad reaction to a medication at the wrong time (such as was the cause of my father’s own untimely death), getting struck by lightning, figuratively or literally...shot by a bigot, victim of a space shuttle explosion or terrorist attack…. Things which haunt me to consider...when I was younger I felt morally obligated to envision tragedies of all kinds befalling me if only to “hold the hands” of the less fortunate in my own way and share the misery with them. But to fixate on this dogmatically is masochistic and raises no one up...brings no wisdom or improvement or real hope to anyone.    So I seek understanding for knowledge’s sake...*...I find myself more attracted to “the media” industry now than academia but it is strange. Like a divorce.*...Although the trouble of people feeling they must kiss ass is just a social problem in general, not industry specific. That is one thing believe it or not I refuse to do. I find it degrading. I find ass-kissing and being told what to say or think without any invitation for discussion to be utterly degrading. *...All of this can be VERY expensive business, I realize. You know...independent media...starting up your own business, living on your own terms, making art, saying what you really think (some people experience hurt feelings very easily. I feel bad about it but it’s also not fair for their hurt feelings to get priority over honesty. I believe the right course of action is thus diplomacy, which I give my all to as a writer and activist though I sometimes fail. I remember when I applied for a political organization and asked questions about their policy positions. I didn’t mean to poke holes in their lifework or disrespect their souls but if they will not be open to discussion then they too are poking holes...to some degree it actually is a “dog eat dog” world.*....how many people do you know who are or seem or say they are tired or busy? I haven’t taken a tally but I have heard people describe themselves as tired and /or busy almost, I think, as often I’ve heard people ask the question “how are you?” which, if not followed by “tired” or “busy” is followed by that word “good” which...maybe you are a little suspicious of or maybe you know full well you are telling a so called “white lie” as to not tell the story of all that’s frustrating you. (In fact, this is all so common place that it is brought up in friendlier conversation often itself!)*... About these somewhat and “sort of” seemingly chaotic thoughts (to borrow Dylan’s description “sort of”  once more! And perhaps not for the last time!)…the sense of chaos and confusion is not…so far as I can tell…fundamentally epistemological. (Epistemology tends towards the cut and dry for me: if you’re acquainted with me you know my mantra of objectivity, empiricism, non-contradiction, law of identity, pragmatic clarification…) Rather, it’s a struggle to accept a degree of imperfection...*...What exactly is the definition of media? And why (emphasis here on the WHY) can I be confident that this definition, more so than all others, is THE definition? Can that which we call “art,” just to give you an example of what happens in my mind as I contemplate definitions, count as part of that broader notion of “media?”FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT, VISIT https://publiccommentpodcast.com/  

With the heightened tension on the right and the left with respect to the gun violence crisis in America the President is quick to blame mental illness, while many experts and critics on the left warn that mental health is not the fundamental problem and cause. But if we do not refer to the disturbances within the mind that lead up to an act of mass violence as part of a "mental illness," how are we supposed to characterize it? Mere unethical behavior? But not all breaches of ethics are the same. Is there any connection between severe lack of ethics and mental illness? What standards do we refer to reach such a conclusion? To the degree which we might associate gun violence with unethical behavior one question raised is whether or not the perpetrator of violence fully "knows" what he or she is doing is absolutely "unethical."For more about Public Comment visit the website: https://publiccommentpodcast.com/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featuredVisit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com